The Beer Nut

The sheer dogged resilience of some some beers is staggering. Gold Label (formerly Whitbread Gold Label) is a prime example, normally to be found skulking in the corner of the Sainsbury's beer aisle, propping up another haggard old-timer Mackeson Stout, both forced shamefully into garish modern dress for the benefit of a target audience that cares little for them, or anything much else, I imagine. Thomas was kind enough to acquire this can for me: the fact that it comes in four-packs has always put me off, even though it sells for buttons.

So what have we got? 7.5% ABV -- "Strong as a double scotch, less than half the price" ran the strapline: an all-time classic of superliminal advertising -- it's a wholesome dark gold colour. The head doesn't hang around and the body is barely troubled by bubbles. It smells like a fairly typical pale bock: nettles and sugar, though there's also an edge of sherry in there hinting at something more dangerous. And yet it's surprisingly innocuous on tasting. There are no really strong flavours, no tramp-juice sickliness or overdone booze heat. Rather it's smooth, lightly sugary like candyfloss, and with some subtle mango and apple flavours in the background. No, I'm not taking the piss. The alcohol does get more pronounced as it warms, unsurprisingly, and some nasty marker pen and acetone begins to creep in.

Overall, not the disaster I was expecting. I can see how it survived the darker days of 20th century British brewing, offering something with a bit more personality than insipid canned lager or insipid canned bitter. Today it's deserving of some retro cred, I think.

Time to haul in the net and see what new Irish beers have shown up this last few weeks.

First up, one that made its début, briefly, at the St. Patrick's beer festival in Dublin last month: Carlow Brewing's collaboration with Poland's Pinta brewery, called Lublin to Dublin. It's a 6.5% ABV oatmeal stout and has all the fullness and smoothness you'd expect. In fact, it's all about the texture; the flavour is a sideshow. Not that there's anything wrong with the flavour: mild roast, cocoa, a little putty and some beautiful summer fruit topnotes. It's wonderfully sinkable and so finely balanced you could nearly lose sight of it. I hope they'll be making more.

Meanwhile, The Larder restaurant on Dublin's Parliament Street has teamed up with Galway's Independent Brewing Company to produce a range of house beers under the "Dublin Brewer" brand, cheekily subverting the city crest by swapping one of the castles for a beer mug. First out of the blocks is their Irish Pale Ale at 6.1% ABV. It arrives a hazy dark orange colour, the bottle conditioning leaving a modest skim of yeast on the bottom of the bottle. The aroma is all apricot and mango but the flavour is more intense, with big grapefruit bitterness, spiced up by the use of rye in the grist. Alongside the hops there's a beautiful thirst-quenching tannic quality, resulting in a lemon tea effect in the finish. This is an invigorating pale ale, with a squeaky teeth-cleaning bitter intensity which paired perfectly with The Larder's ribeye steak.

And because one of these posts wouldn't be one of those posts without a Galway Bay beer, presenting Incognita, latest in the brewery's pilot series. It is, as the tap badge helpfully explains, a NZ-hopped saison of a relaxed 4.8% ABV. There's a little bit of a split personality here, as the earthy, gritty dry crispness created by the voracious saison yeast strain battles epically against a strong acid hop bitterness. It's actually not that pleasant a sensation at first but gradually the two elements separate from each other and can be appreciated on their own merits: the refreshing bite of the highly attenuated body and the more subtle mandarin and grape roundness from the hops. No cattiness from these Kiwis either, I am pleased to report. At a fiver for a 2/3 pint it's not the sessionable summer beer I was kinda hoping it might be at that strength, but it's definitely an interesting experience, for hop fans and saison enthusiasts alike.

That's it for the moment. No Mescan, Carrig, Poker Tree, Farmageddon or Munster Brewing? I hear you cry. What kind of half-assed Irish beer blog is this? you wail. In due course, dear reader. Hopefully the upcoming Easter Beer Festival at Franciscan Well and the Craft Beer & Spirit extravaganza which starts today across The Porterhouse estate will plug a few of those gaps.

We interrupt our regularly scheduled nothing-at-all to bring news of a new Irish beer which has just started appearing in specialty beer bars around the country. Beoir#1 is the result of a crowd-funding initiative by Black's Brewery in Kinsale. Among the incentives was the opportunity to have a custom batch of beer made, and a group of Beoir members clubbed together to commission that. In the interests of transparency, I was one of the commissioning members, but also in the interests of transparency I had no input into the recipe (other than the occasional vote): all that was left to people much more adept at such things, nor did I attend the brewday, which happened on 8th March last (videos of the day from two of the attendees are here and here).

Back when we were discussing what sort of beer to make, it was mentioned that there was no big and hoppy double IPA being made in Ireland, so we decided to use the opportunity to send out a signal that this is the sort of beer that at least some consumers would like to exist. Of course, in the intervening months the Galway Bay Brewery pre-empted us with their amazing Of Foam & Fury, but we stuck to our guns, opting for a slightly higher strength (9% ABV) and a different hop bill: Citra, Galaxy, Summit and Topaz, for maximum fruit impact.

With all the funders' allocation bottled up last Monday, there was a small amount left over for kegging and distribution. On Thursday night the first of these was tapped at 57 The Headline and yesterday I went in for my first taste.

It arrived a dark orange colour, topped by the sort of light tan head you only get on the stickiest of strong hop bombs. It's not sticky at all, however: the texture is surprisingly light and masks the alcohol well. The aroma is very different to what I was expecting. Instead of citrus or pine, it smells of boozy warmth and gentle old-fashioned spices: a bit like hippocras, which might possibly be the worst descriptor I've ever used on this blog. And on tasting it's clear that the malts are very much in control. There are lots of dark flavours of biscuit and even chocolate, though that light texture and a strong tannic presence keeps things from getting cloying. And what are the hops up to while all this is going on? Well there's no doubting the bitterness: a sharp bite opens proceedings and it leaves a resinous coating in the mouth afterwards, but of the zingy zesty fruit I had been hoping for there is no sign, unfortunately.

Perhaps it's a good thing that it's so different from Of Foam & Fury, and indeed from O'Hara's Double IPA. Good for diversity in the Irish double IPA market (because that's a thing now), and good that each of these three beers are doing different things within the style instead of treading on each others' toes. If you want to try it next to Galway Bay's DIPA, you can do that today at The Salt House, and probably later in The Oslo. Beoir#1 is also pouring at The Bierhaus in Cork, and is expected at Farrington's in Dublin and the Franciscan Well Easter Festival in due course. We're doing our best to keep track of its whereabouts here.

Thanks, finally, to Nigel who led the recipe development, Andrew and Reuben who did so much in the background to make this happen and especially to long-suffering brewer Sam Black for coming up with this crazy idea and actually seeing it through. We must do it all again some time.

The lovely people of Associazione Degustatori Birra (Lazio branch) were kind enough to invite me out to Rome for a few days in mid-March, in exchange for some words on Irish craft beer at their St. Patrick's Day event. My last visit to the Eternal City was just a couple of years too early for the rise of Italian craft beer and it had been on my return-visit list for a while so I leapt at the chance.

An early start had me in downtown Rome by late morning on the 17th and I took advantage of the fine weather to do some exploring of historical sites I missed last time round. Returning to my hotel in the afternoon I called in to Domus Birra, the city's best-known bottle shop. A boggling array of Italian craft beers were on offer so I picked a reasonably priced one more or less at random, and because of the name.

So, Turan's Dry Hard 2 was my first beer of the trip, a 6% ABV IPA. It poured an unpleasantly murky brown amber colour and the dry hopping certainly makes its presence felt in the aroma: a powerful blast of white plum and lychee. The texture is smooth and the flavour begins with a rather harsh bitterness. It tastes as clean as it looks, some lightly spicy orange and grapefruit flavours buzzing about in the background, but nothing distinctive. The aroma keeps on giving, all the way through, but I'd like a bit more zip.

Zip aplenty I found a few hours later down at Il Maltese a fun little craft beer shack on Piazza Epiro which was hosting my talk. Brewfist's Bionic amber ale was on tap. Like the foregoing, and like most Brewfist beers, there's a waxy bitter punch at the start. However what follows is a tour de force of citrus hop flavours: spritzy, juicy and very moreish, shading towards heavier weedy funk at times as well.

From the bottled selection I got to try Cogs coffee porter by Laboratorio, much lauded by my hosts. Unfortunately it was a dud, infected with nasty acetone nail varnish flavours. Underneath this it was just about possible to detect a pleasant mild milky coffee flavour and hints of lavender and chocolate, but nothing earth-shaking. I was more impressed by Urbe from Eternal City, a local contract operation. This cloudy orange number is an approachable 5% ABV and has lots of lovely soft cuddly peach flavours. A beautifully refreshing sessioner.

We were joined briefly by the brewers behind a brand new start-up. I may be among the first anglophones to encounter the brand though was far too polite to point out the inadvertent hilarity of their chosen name: Superbum. Still, quality will carry them a long way and that they have. Blondie is a 5.2% ABV wit-like blonde. The wit spicing is missing but the orange peel is very present, enhanced by the generous addition of orangey Styrian Goldings. What it lacks in veracity to the witbier style it makes up for in refreshment power.

The other one to emerge from Superbum is called Invasion, a pale ale of 5.5% ABV. Not so pale, however, more a dark amber. The aroma is all fresh oily hops and there's no mistaking the heavy use of Sorachi Ace in the flavour: coconut and lemon pith in abundance. It's perhaps a little too intense to consider drinking a second, but nice for one.

Top of my hitlist for day two was the city's best-known beer specialist Ma Che Siete Venuti A Fà in Trastevere. The poky two-room pub was in the middle of a German-themed festival and I'll cover the good stuff from that in the next post so the only Italian beer I had there was Lambrate's Robb de Matt. This is a near-perfect recreation of a pale 'n' hoppy English bitter, if a little strong at 5.5% ABV. The aroma is a gentle citrus which translates into a lemon sherbet and peach flavour, with some light herbal notes and just enough bitter punchiness. The cask serve gives it a beautiful soft effervescence.

I trekked deeper into Trastevere next, to eat at Brasserie 4:20, home of the Revelation Cat brewing company. It didn't quite live up to the hype for me. The décor is very high-concept designery, with banks and banks of taps, some suspended overhead at the bar, and cask handpulls aplenty. But the menu is not much more than burgers and crisps. Filling in a slip with your choice of sauce and topping does not a classy dining experience make. From the spendy beer menu I selected Bombay Cat, a double black IPA. Lordy. This is powerful stuff: 9% ABV and jet black. One sip delivers a green blast of fresh crunchy spinach and cabbage, lots of acid and odd herbal bath salts overtones. Behind the hops there's masses of heavy thick chocolate too: all the features of double IPA and imperial stout writ large. I almost felt abused by it, but thrilled as well.

Just time for one pub on my third and final day in Rome, but I made the most of it. Open Baladin is the local outlet for Piedmont's Baladin brewery, a large and rambling pub-restaurant with a vast tap and bottle selection. Here the food is something to behold, specialising in Piedmontese meats. The steak tartare was spectacular. Open is the name of the house beer, a 7.5% ABV IPA. It's a clear middling orange colour with an clove aroma. The flavour mostly consists of artificial candy fruit, mixed with an unpleasant musty staleness on a heavy body. Not something I'd want as the flagship beer in my pub.

Hoping for something a bit like the previous day's feline black IPA experience, I chose del Borgo's Hoppy Cat Cascadian dark ale. 5.8% ABV and dark garnet in colour, topped by a creamy ivory head. It lures the drinker in with a mild mandarin aroma but there's a sucker punch of bitterness in the first sip, next to a different sort of bitterness from the roast grain. Overall a simple and pleasant brew and very different from Revelation Cat's soundalike.

Sticking with del Borgo, I realised that I've never tasted their original beer ReAle, and since it was here on cask I decided I'd put that right. Another English beer clone, this time a quality brown bitter, it's a clear burnished copper colour with all the proper nutty flavours, waxy bitterness and refreshing tannins. Only the massive 6.4% ABV strength detracts from its balanced sessionable qualities.

On the basis that you should never pass up a beer with your name and ethnicity on it, I went next for Nut Irish Jinn from Black Barrels in Turin. It was listed in the sour section of the menu but I wouldn't like to hazard a guess at the style: there's a lot going on in it, starting with a sweet lactic perfume aroma, a sort of floral balsamic effect. Dry hopping in the barrel has given it a light citrus zest and there's also a savoury ambergris resinousness peppered by sparks of incense, all this set on a clean refreshing sour base. Phew. It's a workout for the palate, and the notebook, but well worth it.

One last glass before running for the airport bus and I wanted to make it count. Say hello, then, to Baladin's Xyauyu barley wine. This 13.5% ABV version has been given time in rum casks and arrives dark brown and completely flat, smelling like all of its strength plus brown sugar and marker pens. The barrel has certainly left its mark as it tastes like nothing so much as aged dark rum: hot and woody. The beeriness is almost lost, with a caramel malt sweetness just peeping through. A tasty drop, but mostly it left me wondering what the unaged version tastes like.

We'll retrace our steps in the next post, looking at the non-Italian beers on offer in Rome.

Following on from Monday's post on the Italian beers I found last month in Rome, this one is about the foreign selection. I did try to drink local as much as possible, but some things were just too interesting to pass up.

My reasoning behind choosing Lervig's Johnny Low in Il Maltese is that I had a whole evening of talking ahead of me and wanted something I could sip safely while waiting for the event to start. A Norwegian IPA at 2.5% ABV seemed like just the ticket. It's lovely too: pale yellow with loads of lemon sherbet. Yes, the body is watery but not in a bad way -- it adds to the quenching power and drinkability. In fact, it was tough going to keep sipping it, this beer virtually pours itself down your throat.

I'd been through most of Il Maltese's draught selection by the time I got to Hoepfner Porter, exported from Baden-Württemberg. It's a wan pale red colour and very sweet, to the point of sickliness. It lays on cherries and milk chocolate without the weight of body to support the strength of the flavours. Just a mildly dry finish and a sudden sharp burst of cherry sourness rescues it, but I wouldn't be rushing back for another.

Before leaving I got a small taste of Amager's Wookie 9% ABV double IPA, before it all ran out. I can see why it's popular: pale blonde and with a super clean pithy hop flavour, unsullied by booze heat or crystal malt sweetness.

I mentioned on Monday that I found Ma Che Siete Venuti A Fà in the middle of celebrating German beer. It would have been rude not to join in. Besides, turning down a Schlenkerla beer I'd never tasted before is simply unthinkable. And so a large glass of Schlenkerla Fastenbier was acquired. Funny, I thought this style was usually super-strong, but this one is a mere 5.5% ABV, arriving a rich chestnut red colour. It has a lot in common with other beers from the Bamberg brewery: bags of beechwood smoke, of course, and a little bit of the tarryness you find in the Urbock, though not as pronounced. The real genius of this beer -- I opined to myself as the glass emptied itself more rapidly than one would expect for something so powerfully flavoured -- is the finish: there's virtually none. All the action happens while it's in your mouth, and when it's gone, it's gone. Which means you have to take another mouthful. And then order another glass when the first one empties. "Moreish" barely begins to cover it.

But I'm made of stronger stuff, me, and worked my way heroically across the taps. Freigest Salzspeicher caught my eye, a 6% ABV sour raspberry porter. This squirted flatly from the tap, forming a loose-bubbled head over a black body. A wary sniff revealed something that smells like the bottom of a punnet of elderly raspberries. The flavour is fresher, but still all raspberry and hardly any porter, only a tiny touch of dark roasted grain. The sourness kind of gets buried too: while the high attenuation is tasteable, the tartness of the raspberry dovetails very neatly with the inherent tartness of the beer and it's hard to tell which contributes what. It's an interesting experiment, but after the genius that is Schlenkerla it tasted like amateur hour.

There was an English stout on the handpumps: Siren's Sweet Dreams. This has a heady cocoa aroma tempered by the acidic tang of curing tobacco. The flavour is simpler, dominated by that chocolate and nicely smooth to drink. It's unusual for a beer that's not a pale ale to be worth it just for the aroma alone, but this is one of those.

I couldn't resist a swift tot of Gänstaller-Bräu Affumicator before moving on, an all-time favourite. Magic.

Later that evening, wandering alone in the depths of southern Trastevere I popped into Birrifugio for one. There's a small but eclectic selection in this vaguely English-style neighbourhood pub, with a beer each from Adnams, Carlow Brewing, Weihenstephaner, Dark Star and Amager on tap. What caught my eye, however, was Bayerischer Bahnhof Original Gose, as far as I know the only example of this style-of-the-moment brewed in the city most associated with it: Leipzig. It arrived looking and smelling like a simple witbier: hazy straw-coloured with mild herbal aromas. Its true nature is much more apparent on tasting as the salt and coriander are right up front giving it a lip-smacking crispness and offering cold ocean-grade refreshment. I'd loved to have stayed for another, and loved even more to be in a city where this is the sort of beer you get when you ask for a beer. I could drink a lot of its simple complexity.

But that's where this trip's beers end. A big thank you to Silvia and the team at Associazione Degustatori Birra for making it all possible. I did little more than scratch my major itches regarding Rome's craft beer pubs but I'm aware there's still plenty more to explore on future visits and that the local beer scene is expanding at a phenomenal pace. Forza la rivoluzione!

I've lost track of the number of times I've been to Brussels over the last 12 years. I'm sure it's into double figures by now. And while fixtures like A La Bécasse (right) and Toone are still favourites and oft returned to, there's always somewhere new. Occasionally new to the city, but mostly just new to me. Reuben and I were over on Beoir business earlier this month and as well as the above mentioned fixtures, and several others, I also got to drop in to Café Monk, a beautiful tiled bar near Place Sainte-Catherine, and pay my first visit to The Hoppy Loft, an oasis of calm and good beer above the pandemonium that is Impasse de la Fidelité on a Friday night.

And then there's the beers. In my advancing years I'm finding it harder and harder to pass by old favourites on the beer menus in favour of new ticks, but I try to strike a balance, for you, dear reader.Yes, there was Rodenbach, yes there was Zinne Bir, yes there was Guinness Foreign Extra. But there was also...

Buffalo Bitter, one of many Belgian IPAs I drank while in-country. I discovered this while basking in the sunshine outside Le Lombard. It's 8% ABV, highly fizzy and sharply bitter. Other than that, standard Belgian IPA rules apply: a warm candy-sugar sweetness rests uneasily beside the hops. Still, it was better than Buffalo Stout which is a percentage point stronger and a worrying pale reddish colour. Like lots of continental stouts it has that unpleasant burnt caramel, though not as strongly as some, and there's also a strange sour quality. It's quite plain fare and might even pass for refreshing if it weren't so damn fizzy.

Keeping things strong, dark and outside Le Lombard, there's LeFort by the Bockor brewery near Kortrijk. 8.5% ABV and a garnet colour that's only a little paler than the stout. I have a feeling the the strength alluded to in the name refers not only to the ABV: this stuff is hot. You get caramel fudge and marker pens, and more than an air of tramp-juice syrupyness. It's hard going. The same brewery also makes Vanderghiste oude bruin, a much more palatable dark beer: 5.5% ABV and just lightly sour but mostly balanced and refreshing.

One of the best dark beers of the trip came from NovaBirra, a brewery south of Brussels, near Waterloo, which has been going since 2008. Big Mama is another 9% ABV stout using entirely Alsatian hops which give it a fantastic floral, lavender-and-bubblegum flavour, set against the smooth chocolate from the malt. There was more lavender in Moeder Fucker 3, a heavily hopped saison produced for, and found in, Moeder Lambic Fontainas. Resin on the nose and thick, heavy granny's-bathroom perfume and lavender soap. This sweary beer won't have a problem if someone tells it to wash its mouth out.

Hops are very much in vogue in Belgium at the moment, and among the hop-forward beers I encountered was the aggressively-named Hop Verdomme by Kerkom, on tap in Bier Circus. Again there's that orange boiled sweet effect in place of clean hop freshness, with an exotic incense spicing as well. It's a little sticky despite being a mere 7% ABV, but I detected a hint of sourness about it, a waft of salt and vinegar crisps. Odd, and not the intense hop experience the name promised. While I was drinking this, Reuben chanced his arm on Kameleon Ginseng, a dry hazy blonde beer which tastes powerfully of ginseng: all the herbal, earthy, rooty punch of it. It's a ginseng beer for people who want their ginseng beer to taste unmistakeably of ginseng. It's not for the rest of us.

Back to the hops, and Gandavum was one of the better ones. This is the house beer of Waterhuis aan de Bierkant, encountered when we stopped off in Ghent on the way back to the airport. They advertise it as a dry-hopped blonde but it shows many of the Belgian IPA qualities, better than in some bona fide Belgian IPAs, in fact. Yes there's that candy sweetness, a a Belgian yeast spicing, but there's a lovely simple juicy peachiness as well.

It seems the big boys are well aware of the hop trend, and chasing their own hop-driven La Chouffe brand extensions, Duvel also now make Vedett IPA, the stripy label adapted to the colours of the Indian flag. Having ordered it out of morbid curiosity, I was very surprised to discover it's actually quite tasty. Warm for a beer that's just 6% ABV, and there's the usual Belgian yeast thing going on, but it's a cleaner flavour profile than most, making it possible to pick out a definite citric tartness and soft thirst quenching nectarine flavour as well. This is wonderfully complex in a way I'd never expect a Vedett beer to be. Meanwhile the dunce cap goes to Palm for Palm Hop Select made, it says on the Internet, using hops grown at the actual brewery. Well, maybe they should leave things to a professional grower in future, because this is a dull sweaty mess.

From the odd-but-inevitable file comes this one by Hof Ten Dormaal: Oak Aged Jenever Barrel. So enamoured by their cleverness on jumping aboard the barrel-ageing bandwagon with a native low countries gin cask that they seem to have forgotten about the beer which goes inside. Once you separate out the mild herbal tang imparted by the jenever and the vanilla from the wood you're left with really a rather plain Belgian ambrée.

We'll finish this post back in Ghent, where we ended up at the Trollekelder, a rather fun knockabout multilevel boozer north of the city centre. Among the beers vying to be Ghent's official one is Gentse Strop ("Ghent Noose"), even though it's brewed some distance away in Oudenaarde. The gallows-shaped display stand is ubiquitous around town. It's a pretty straightforward blonde: as clean and clear as you like, with a lovely crisp celery bite. Trollekelder also had a gueuze that was new to me: De Cam Oude Lambiek: spendy at a tenner a bottle, but I was on my way home and still had money in my pocket. I don't know that it's much better than all the other old lambics out there. It has maybe a bit more of a pronounced barrel flavour and is smooth rather than sharply sour. Best of all it's packed with that brick-cellar and gunpowder nitre spice that I love in the style.

So that's what was new and (mostly) exciting. In the next post we'll see how I fared going back to a handful of breweries and brands that I knew of old.

Troubadour Magma is damn near irresistible, and Westkust is a comforting friend, so I'm always alert for new beers from The Musketeers in the hope that this classic double-act can be turned into a trilogy. The first candidate was one I found at a studenty pub called Le Coq, just up from the Bourse in Brussels: Troubadour Spéciale. And it is grim: a really boring red ale with masses of porridgey grain that is a chore to drink through. Why, Musketeers, why? A few days later, and Waterhuis aan de Bierkant in Ghent. Troubadour Obscura in the fridge, in my glass, in my mouth. What the hell is THIS? It appears to be a stout of some sort, a strong one at 8.2% ABV. It's roaringly sour, all lactic tang and a stubborn awkward brett funk squatting in the middle of the flavour, refusing to let anything else out. There's no mention of this "character" in the official tasting notes so I suspect something just went up the left with my bottle. I think I'll wait until I can have it on draught before chancing this one again. That's 0 for 2 in new Troubadour beers. Stick to the Magma, kids.

The other progressive Belgian brand I always look forward to new beers from is Brasserie de la Senne. They have an adapted version of their classic Taras Boulba pale ale, produced in collaboration with Birrificio di Montegioco and called Taras Runa. Like Taras Boulba this is a hazy shade of yellow, and like Taras Boulba it blends new world citrus hop flavours with light Belgian yeast spicing. Like Taras Boulba it's an approachable, sessionable strength. Actually: this is almost identical to Taras Boulba. It's perfectly decent, but I'm marking it down for being far too close to a beer they already make. What's the point?

De la Senne also have a new black IPA out, called Black in Japan, with yet another gorgeous label. It's 7.2% ABV and was a bit of a job to pour, what with all the foam. I was expecting a much bigger hop punch than it delivered. What we have here is a perfectly decent export-strength stout, with plenty of dry roast in both the aroma and flavour, plus a crunchy veg complexity from the hops. It's not a million miles from good old Wrasslers XXXX, a beer I'm coming increasingly to believe would be badged as a black IPA if it were brewed today for the first time.

This was in Poechenellekelder where one of the seasonal draughts was from the St-Feuillien/Green Flash collaboration series. The black saison they did previously was wonderful, so I had high hopes for Belgian Coast, a 7% ABV IPA. It arrived very cold, rather flat and quite a dark shade of amber and is definitely more Belgium than San Diego in the aroma: sugar, spice, fruit esters, but only a bit of hop greenness. The flavour mixes the sticky Belgian candy with the vegetal hops in an odd way, but it's not without its charms. There's a long metallic afterburn in the finish. Not as much fun as the saison, and not all that different to a zillion other Belgian IPAs, but quite nice to drink.

Dupont's archetypal saison needs very little introduction but I was acutely aware of how few of their other beers I had tasted and decided to put that right. Redor is the basic pils, well-assembled if a little nondescript. A sharp, almost sour, aroma and a flavour which combines light peachiness with some dry grain husk. There's also Monk's Stout, another simple one. 5.2% ABV and nicely dry and crisp: not always a guarantee in a country that seems to tolerate overly sugary stouts. Bons Vœux is a strong cloudy blonde, almost 10% ABV, and nicely warming with it. There's not much going on the the flavour, however, just a bit of cereal and a token sharpness from the hops. And finally Bier De Miel which, as the name suggests, is brewed with honey. Quite a lot of it, I'd say: from the beeswax aroma to the smooth sweet middle to the herbal aftertaste, this definitely shows how good honey can be in a beer without taking it over completely.

I confess I hadn't had any of the beers from the Brussels Beer Project before this trip, but I had heard of them. It's an on-trend collectivised collaboarative contract brewing operation that has been going for about a year and so far produced six beers. I got to try two of them: Dark Sister is a dark ale of 6.66% ABV and uses Citra, Simcoe and Smaragd hops. It pours a blood red colour with lots of dark malt coffee flavours to the fore. This is followed by a kind of plummy sourness and a bit of blackcurrant jam. I'd probably be calling it a dark mild if I had to guess a style, but either way it's a very interesting combination of flavours. Delta is the beer it's a sibling to, a 6% ABV pale ale using the same hop combination. The first one I got was a dud: all stale oxidation and sharp lactic sourness. Reuben rescued me by donating a portion of the one he was drinking. It's another one of those orange barley sweet Belgian IPAs, though a burst of grapefruit zest in the finish, combined with the modest strength, lifts it a little beyond most of its contemporaries.

Three new ones from three of the big-hitting geek-facing Belgian breweries next. VI Wheat (picture, right) is the latest in the numerical sequence by Jandrain-Jandrenouille and it's a weird one. There's a herbal urinal cake aroma and a lot of funk in the flavour. I don't really remember what it tasted like when I drank it in Moeder Lambic Fontainas but my notes say "lemons and cowshit" so perhaps that's for the best. Speaking of sequences, De Ranke have followed up their classic XX Bitter with XXX Bitter, though at 6% ABV it's actually slightly weaker than its predecessor. It's nearly a perfect Belgian blonde, beautifully smooth with clear, clean, polished flavours of light citrus fruit and candystore sugars. And so to Struise, one of the more one-uppy of Belgium's breweries. Their offering this trip was nothing more complicated than a 10% ABV bourbon barrel aged dark rye tripel, and they too have appropriated the XXX name. It's a murky brown and the aroma is full of that loud wood effect you get with so many bourbon-aged beers. On tasting there's no sign of any tripelish qualities, and I couldn't taste any rye. Instead it's smooth and warming with some really beautiful port and sherry notes. And bourbon? Yes, a little: enough to impart the flavour without it completely taking over. Nicely done, Struise.

Girardin is very much an old friend when I'm in Brussels. Their Gueuze is top-notch and can often be found for a euro or so cheaper than its main rivals in the pub. I was intrigued when I discovered that Bier Circus was serving straight Girardin Lambic on cask, pleased when I noticed that they were charging €2 for a 200ml glass of it, and ecstatic when it actually arrived. I never knew Brussels had an answer to Cologne's drinking style and the following review is based on the dregs at the bottom of my third glass. It's an unassuming clear brown colour and almost totally flat. It's also not especially sour, but dry and tannic instead with just the suggestion of oak. More than anything, like your Kölsch and your Alt, it's refreshing, in a grab-sink-and-go sort of way, a pint of Brussels plain, if you will. I wish more places than the Moeder Lambics and Bier Circus served cask lambic.

Until next time, Belgium...

I didn't really know what to be more surprised at when a review bottle of St Erhard arrived via the company's local distributor: the hip, Absolut-esque branding on a lager from uber-traditional Bamberg, or the claim on the back that the clear glass is somehow UV-protected. A bit of asking around on Twitter regarding the latter turned up the suggestion that it was legit and that a glass coating does indeed exist to skunk-proof beer bottles. This one end up sitting in my glass-fronted beer fridge for two months so at the very least I had the opportunity to test this claim.

Inside, it's an amber lager of 5% ABV and helpfully lists its malt types (Vienna, Pilsner, CaraMunich) and hops (Tettnanger) on the bottle. I couldn't help but detect an air of skunkiness when I took the cap off, but if I didn't imagine it, there's not very much. Hooray for chemicals! Lots of fizz at first, dropping to a mere rash of bubbles on the surface. The aroma is all grain husk: a dry and almost roasty crunchy smell. And on tasting there's more of that plus possibly some chocolate and liquorice too. In a blind tasting I imagine I would swear this is a porter, and the thinness of body does nothing to dispel that impression. I get a miniscule whiff of herbal hops in the afterburp, but otherwise this is cereals all the way.

Not a bad beer, perfectly drinkable and that. But not exactly brimming with Bamberg quality. Oh: it's contract brewed 20km outside Bamberg? Well maybe that explains it. As you were.

(The rubbish pun in the title, by the way, is there to point out that today I'm one year short of ten doing this blog thing. I'll try and come up with a better one for next year.)

It's not autumn, but I figured Anchor's BigLeaf Maple"autumn red" should still be OK to drink, being 6% ABV. It's not really red, more of a coppery orange. The smell is enticing: a fruity spicy sweetness, all candied banana and toffee apples. I experienced a little trepidation at the prospect of a sticky sugary mess, but that's not the case. The flavour is clean as a whistle, presenting clear maple syrup woody sweetness as the centrepiece, garnished with gunpowder spices and a sprinkling of roast. And it's the maple and spice that gets left behind in the aftertaste, not the cloying syrup.

My finishing impression, even this far from autumn, is of one of those typical American pumpkin beers, only without the unsubtle flavour additions. Something as well put together as this shouldn't need to wait until the far side of the equinox.

My good friend Mr Gray is at the tiller for this round of The Session. He wants us to tell the story of a local brewery. During the nineteenth century there was no shortage of those in the south-western quarter of Dublin city. It seems that the city's brewing industry was exempted from the economic damage done by the 1800 Act of Union, which changed Dublin from national capital to provincial UK city. The toffs may have taken their furnishings, fittings and fine wines to London but the ordinary citizens still needed their pints of plain, I guess.

The Phoenix Brewery was one of seven along James's Street, on what became Dublin's industrial outskirts as the new Georgian city broke beyond its medieval boundaries. It was first established in 1778 and grew to prominence under the ownership of Daniel O'Connell Jr., with O'Connell's Dublin Ale even warranting a mention in Joyce's Finnegans Wake. Phoenix's growth paralleled that of Guinness's across the street, and by the end of the century, when Guinness's was poised to become the largest brewery in the world, Phoenix was Ireland's second. Like its larger neighbour, Phoenix sprawled as it grew and when Alfred Barnard visited around 1890 it had just acquired the adjoining Manders Brewery site, thereby tripling its size. Barnard describes¹ a sequence of rooms with vast fermentation and maturation tanks, as well as an extensive basement complex holding upwards of 3,000 barrels of stout and porter, ready for market. Its position on the north side of James's Street gave the advantage of easy access to the Liffey quays, and consequently to Dublin port, Great Britain and the Empire.

The Phoenix Vat House, from Barnard's Noted Breweries

1897 saw Phoenix floated on the stock market². Perhaps the first indication that all was not rosy came two years later when the new owners sued the former proprietor, Charles Brenan, for overvaluing the company -- what had been sold for £265,000 turned out to be worth less than half that, they argued³. But Brenan stayed on as company chairman even as Phoenix continued to decline. Opening the 1901 AGM he told shareholders "I am much disappointed at the result, but our porter sales have fallen away, with the consequence that our gross profit has decreased, while our fixed charges remain the same." He pointed the finger of blame not at the competing brewery across James's Street, but at his own customers, adding "If all the ale sold in Dublin as O'Connell's ale was O'Connell's ale our trade would be much larger, and we can only hope that the good sense of the traders will prevail"⁴. An attempt by the shareholders attending the meeting to sell the company back to Brenan was rejected, a sign that this decline was most likely terminal. A similar tale of woe was trotted out at the 1904 AGM, this time explained by a general depression in the licensed trade across the UK, not any failing on the brewery's part⁵.

Matters reached a head in the summer of 1905 when the venerable D'Arcy's Anchor Brewery, another neighbour, acquired Phoenix outright, initially with the intention of keeping both plants and all beer brands⁶. That lasted until 1909 when D'Arcy's consolidated its production facilities at the Anchor and sold the former Phoenix and Manders site to Guinness's. Ironically, this act of consolidation was the saving of the Phoenix as a location for brewing. O'Connell's Ale limped along at the Anchor until 1926, at which point the company folded and the brewery later became council flats. But, as part of an expanded St. James's Gate, the Phoenix's legacy lives on and just this year has risen from the ashes once more.

During the recent property boom, Diageo planned to move all of its production to a new state-of-the-art facility outside Dublin. The James's Gate landbank could then be cashed in for a fortune at peak Celtic Tiger prices. The plan never materialised, but the consolidation and modernisation project continued. Brewing has now ceased at Diageo's plants in Waterford, Kilkenny and Dundalk and the new geometric Victoria Quay brewhouse has been constructed, as it happens, on some of the land once occupied by the former Phoenix Brewery.

So I'm guessing that it was here that the latest Smithwick's seasonal was produced. Fair play to the team writing the label copy for Long Summer: they're doing their job properly. "Brewed with noble hops" it says on the neck: that immediately tells me something about what to expect. The added notes on the back, concerning "caramel, green tea and tropical fruits" introduce a slightly confusing element, but plenty of intrigue too.

I was surprised to find on pouring that this refreshing hot-weather beer is actually quite dark: a similar burnished copper tone to regular Smithwick's. The aroma too is the same sort of stewed tea with a faint metallic tang, though maybe there is an extra trace of mango in the background as well. Though all of 4.5% ABV, it's every bit as watery as Smithwick's, though that at least makes it easy drinking, which I guess is the point. There's just enough sparkle to keep it lively without making it difficult. I don't get the green bit, but there is a tannic tea aspect to the taste. However, anyone expecting a rush of hops, noble or otherwise, will be disappointed. Other than the aforementioned aroma there's almost no hop flavour at all.

I guess it succeeds as being a thirst-quenching lawnmower beer, but then you could say the same about regular Smithwick's: a sniff of a mango is insufficient reason to trade up.

I wonder what the late Mr Brenan would have made of it. Is plain-but-accessible Long Summer the kind of beer that would secure the future of his troubled brewery? Perhaps. It's sad that no trace of the Phoenix, Manders or Anchor breweries remain for the visitor today. Phoenix's front office at 89 James's Street still stands, though like many of the surrounding buildings it looks rather neglected. A bronze plaque with a line from Ulysses hangs on the building next door where more of the brewery's offices were, but even it only mentions Guinness's across the way. Someone behind the walls knows the story, though. At the rear of the Diageo complex, just next to their new brewhouse, a sign over the gateway greets visitors:

Out of the embers, she flies!

Notes⁷:
1. Barnard, The Noted Breweries of Great Britain and Ireland (1889-1891), Vol. 3, pp.78-80
2. Coyne, Ireland: Industrial and Agricultural (1902), pp.473-474
3. The Irish Times, 27 June 1899, p.3
4. The Irish Times, 1 January 1902, p.3
5. The Irish Times, 2 January 1905, p.10
6. Weekly Irish Times, 17 June 1905, p.13
7. Added following the realisation that I'd be really cross if I read the above and there weren't any

One of the standard gripes of the Irish beer geek has long been the lack of decent sub-4% ABV beers produced in the country. Over our pints of Porterhouse TSB we've looked enviously at the British beer scene, with all its sessiony goodness, wondering why there isn't more of that kind of thing here.

Help is finally at hand, with two new low(ish) ABV pale ales from Irish micros. They're no twiggy brown bitters, however.

From Black's of Kinsale we have The Session: 3.5% ABV and a perfect clear gold colour. The aroma is a little odd, being unpleasantly stale and a bit sweaty, but that's just a minor blip in what is otherwise a superb beer. The body is properly full, without a trace of wateriness and the flavour starts with a sharp nip of bitter citrus, followed by softer mandarin and a balancing biscuit malt profile. And the acid test: would you know you were drinking a low-strength beer? No, definitely not. The Session stands on its own merits without compromising on anything.

A tough act to follow, but follow it Trouble Brewing have with their latest release Graffiti. This is all of 3.6% ABV, headless, and very murky with it, having almost a pinkish cast to the hazy orange. The filtration system's loss is our gain, however, as the massive fresh pine and juicy mango aroma indicates. On the palate there's a big hit of resinous dank complicated by bitter herbal spices. These are big 3D hops in large quantities, and yet the beer remains immensely sinkable, as something of this strength should be. The texture isn't quite as full bodied as The Session, but it's still not watery at all. Another full-flavoured hoppy pale ale where the low ABV is irrelevant.

Not quite in the same weight category, but I thought I'd mention it while I'm on Irish session ales: I finally got to try Carrig's Piper's Pale Ale on my last visit to Farrington's. This is 4.4% ABV, the normal strength for Irish pale ales, and doesn't try to lay on the hops in a major way. Instead there's a gentle, balanced flavour, full of round ripe soft fruit: peaches, clementines and the like. The low bitterness and soft carbonation means it just slips down, exactly as you'd want a session ale to do. Farrington's has a prodigious selection of Irish and foreign draught beers, but after finishing my Piper's all I wanted was another one.

Carrig's Lager and Red are still contract brewed at Bo Bristle and this is the first beer that I've tried from the new standalone Carrig brewery in Drumshanbo where Kiwi ex-pat Andrew is head brewer. It's a very promising start.

While I'm in catch-up mode, a couple more Irish beers, these ones based on foreign templates.

First up is Fulcrum, a 5% ABV weizen by Clear Sky which brews at Hilden. It's on the pale side for the style but densely murky, topped by a much happier bright white foam. The aroma is bubblegum, candyfloss and a bit of clove rock, with a certain off-putting vinegary sourness too. It's all sweetness and wheat on the palate: I'm jolted back to my childhood and facing a big bowl of Sugar Puffs. The texture is rather thin and the carbonation very low which, for a change, is actually to the beer's detriment. Overall we have a slightly wonky weissbier of the sort you'd tolerate in a German brewpub but as the sole product of an Irish craft beer brand which shares fridge space with some of Bavaria's best it's a bit difficult to understand.

And so to another Irish take on a continental style: Westport Blond from Mescan Brewery in Co. Mayo. Most of the yeasty dregs stayed in the bottle when I poured, leaving me with a clear golden glassful. The aroma is crisp and grainy, and not remotely Belgian. That dry cereal quality is in the middle of the flavour too, and while there's no yeast bite or fruit esters, the hops contribute a very nice honey and mango background flavour, but just as I'm savouring that, the dry acidic bite rises up to take over. Would it pass as a Belgian blonde? Yes, probably. But not the sort I like, unfortunately. There's a Red Tripel also available from Mescan though Redmond's was out of stock when I called in. It sounds fascinating so hopefully I'll get to try it before long.

More new Irish beers to come in my round-up from this year's Franciscan Well Easter Beer Festival next week.

I don't know where Thomas picked me up this bottle of Nils Oscar God Lager, but somewhere in the UK. The back label is particularly interesting, where it describes itself as an "ultra premium craft" beer -- in for a penny, eh? -- and makes clear to the punters that the contents will deliver the "big flavours of a real ale", though there's a somewhat cavalier approach to German styles in these ~~Danes'~~ Swedes' description of their product as a "Dortmunder/Helles Pilsner". Why not throw in Spezial, Kellerbier and see if you can complete the set?

The three dense paragraphs had talked up a good game before I raised the glass. The smell is definitely on the Dortmunder spectrum: a sweet bready aroma, like cornbread, with a flash of metallic hops behind it. No fireworks on tasting, however. Though it's within its expiry date and has been looked after since I got it, there's a distinct staleness: a harsh not-quite-right roughness to a malt flavour that should shimmy charmingly past the palate and down the throat like good Dortmunder Export does. The bready sweetness is too sugary and the hops are nowhere to be found. And while I'm throwing the book at it, I detect a nasty gastric acidic note in the finish too.

I probably wouldn't have been so harsh on this if it had just presented itself as a plain old ~~Danish~~ Swedish craft lager, but by invoking German lager and British ale on the packaging Nils Oscar wrote me a cheque that their beer simply couldn't cash. The lesson for me, then, is never read the label first.

One thousand posts! And to celebrate I'm bringing you all to a beer festival! A beer festival where you can't drink any of the beer because it happened nearly a month ago. Real-time beer notes? What do you think this is, Untappd?

Easter weekend saw the 16th annual festival of Irish beer at the Franciscan Well in Cork. I've only been to seven of them, but even in that time it has changed significantly. The growing crowd of punters necessitated removing some of the outdoor seating, while the growing crowd of brewers meant individual stalls were abandoned in favour of one long L-shaped bar to squeeze the pitches together.

A few regulars were absent: no Hilden, no Hooker, but there were a handful of new brands. JJ's is a recent start-up, based near Charleville on the Limerick-Cork border. Hugo's Pils is the first beer out, and rather good it is too. They haven't bothered with filtration, meaning it retains a healthy wholesome graininess, coupled with a soft soda water texture and a cheeky bite of citrus pith. I'm reminded a lot of the sort of unfiltered pils you get in German brewpubs, though on the good side of that often-wonky quality spectrum.

Staying in the rebel county, 9 White Deer also brought its first beer to market -- Stag Bán. I mention it just for the record as I'd like to allow a bit more time before publishing a review. I don't think I was tasting quite what the brewer intended from this blonde ale.

Cork's other brewpub, Cotton Ball, was present and correct. Already there was a new seasonal, called Indian Summer. I love it when hops present juicy peach flavours and this had that in spades. The texture is all wheaty fluffiness. It'll be a great summer at the Cotton Ball if this beer lasts long enough.

After missing the 2013 festival, UCC Pilot brewery were back and -- shock, horror -- didn't have German style beers on the bar. Instead we were given Specific Pale, a 5.5% ABV pale ale, arriving the purest shade of limpid gold. A sherbet aroma gives way to bright citric zing that could teach many a pale ale just what is meant by cleanness of flavour, and why it's a very good thing. Accompanying it was Bitter Brown Brew: not the most attractive-sounding offering. It has the milky chocolate sweetness one might expect, to begin with, but veers abruptly into a sharp acidic hop finish. It's not an unpleasant arrangement, just a little... unsettling.

The downside of a six-hour stint at an ever-expanding festival is the lack of time I have to enjoy some of the favourite seasonals and hacked specials from breweries I know and like. So no new Dungarvan Mahon Falls for me, and no 2014 Metalman Windjammer. From the former I did get to taste their new Wheat Beer, a super-refreshing 4.9% ABV number: light, pale, and loaded with juicy jaffa flavours. Metalman had their iteration of Unite, a 4% ABV pale ale brewed for International Women's Day back in March. There's a deft bit of balance in this, linking caramel malt flavours with the playful punchiness of Cascade and Simcoe hops for an end result that is simultaneously crisp and sweet.

Independent Brewing had its full range on offer, including a new Independent Stout. For a brewery that has no qualms about ramping up the strength of its beers it's a little surprising that this is only 4.5% ABV, and even moreso when you taste it. The body is fantastically full, helped no doubt by the inclusion of some lactose sugar. A small amount of vanilla pod also went into the mix, though gets a bit lost and the dose is likely to be doubled next time out. Even without that, this is a very distinctive new Irish stout and presents a treat for those who like theirs with a bit of a chocolate and treacle quality.

With my sweet tooth firmly in place it was on to White Gypsy's Brown American Ale. This is the first recipe from new recruit Declan and is a pretty complex offering. It seems to be all about the chocolate at first: milky silky Galaxy bars aided by the smooth rich body. A stouty dryness arrives in shortly after and just when you think you have the measure of it, the hops begin to build, starting as just a complementary fruitiness but by the end of my half there was a definite sharp oily resinousness built up. Who knows where a full pint would lead?

Trouble Brewing had been suspiciously quiet of late as regards new beers, but all that changed as soon as the Franciscan Well opened for business on Easter Saturday, with no fewer than four previously unseen ales making their début. Whistle Blower IPA was my least favourite: 7.6% ABV and a little hot with it, full of caramel and banana esters while the hoppiness sits apart as a rather harsh bitterness with no real nuance of flavour. Much better nuance can be found in Big Brown Bear, Trouble's 6% ABV brown ale. It's another super-smooth brown, full of chocolate but with a bonus of turkish delight rosewater floralness.

Paul and Declan, enjoying the festival banter

Agent Provocateur Rye Red does the hop thing much better. In fact I'd go so far as to say the "red" designation is a bit misleading and this should really be classed as a pale ale, given its dark gold colour. The rye brings the typical squeaky grassy sharpness and this combines neatly with the big mandarin and orange blossom from the Amarillo hops. Lazy Sunday is a saison, and quite an interesting one. There's lots of hoppy pith but a considerable dose of rustic barnyard too. I think I may have become accustomed to cleanness in my saisons so there's nothing wrong with an occasional reminder that they're not all like that.

Acclaim for the beer of the festival was pretty universal, from what I heard. I didn't get to it until quite late, but still agreed that Eight Degrees's The Full Irish was deserving of the accolade. A new silo at the brewery means that they can bulk order grain from an Irish maltster, and this 6%-er is made with 100% Irish malt. Hopwise it's all-American, and shows the same flair for hopping as the World Beer Cup prize-winning Amber-Ella: basically a peach and grapefruit tour de force.

Irish craft brewing may well have outgrown the confines of one pub beer garden some years ago, but The Franciscan Well Easter Festival remains an enjoyable cross-section of what's going on, especially now that County Cork has become the microbrewery centre of the country. Seven years and a multinational takeover notwithstanding, I still highly recommend it.

Shane Long talks to the Dublin Ladies Craft Beer Society

A footnote to Monday's post on the Franciscan Well Easter Beer Festival today. Founder Shane was keen to show off the new education centre that they've put into the upstairs bar, the walls decorated with flavour wheels, brewing diagrams and tutored tasting instructions.

Last year the bar was dedicated to some special cask beers from Molson Coors stablemate Sharp's, and it was the same this time, only with a bigger range and shinier handpumps. With all the Irish beer available downstairs I had only one small taste of one of them: Six Hop, a 3.8% ABV bitter which tasted terribly dull and biscuity for something that uses the H-word in its name. How big a batch did they put the six hop cones into?

The 'Well itself had a couple of new releases downstairs. One is called Eggenstien and is a 5.5% ABV pale brown German bock. It tastes quite inoffensive, striking the right balance between rounded grain flavours and the grassy tang of noble hops, but the smell of it really got to me. I struggle with German noble hops at the best of times and this beer just reeked of the green nettle acridity that turns my stomach. I'm sure it will have its fans among the bock-drinking community but it was just too full-on for me.

I try to avoid writing about beers that are simply blends of other beers. Some of the more geek-focused continental breweries are a little too fond of doing this and I don't feel obliged to provide space for their mixes. However, I'm making an exception for Franciscan Well's Spring Fusion, also available at the Easter Festival. This is a straight saison blended with the brewery's longtime flagship Rebel Red. The result is a fascinating combination of crisp tartness next to totally incongruous red ale toffee and caramel. It shouldn't work, but it does: at once palate cleansing, thirst quenching and comfortingly warm.

Of course, The Franciscan Well are not merely confined to Cork these days. The long reach of Molson Coors and their PR team brought beers and brewer to Dublin last month for an evening's ligging in the opulent surrounds of House bar and restaurant on Leeson Street. After a 4km walk in the warm Spring sunshine, the free Blue Moon on arrival was the nicest Blue Moon I've ever tasted. Mind you, sucking the orange slice was even better than the beer. We also got a try of the new seasonal Summer Honey Wheat. It's pretty poor, as it goes, much like the other Blue Moon seasonals: an aroma consisting of no more than a trace of sugar, and a flavour to match. Some minor honey stickiness is just about detectable on the finish but very little else is going on. I'd swap back to regular Blue Moon in an instant.

Also on the preview list for the evening was Chieftan, an IPA which looks to be joining the permanent draught line-up. It's 5.5% ABV and is another one of those dark oily pale ales, like Porterhouse Hop Head or JW Sweetman Pale Ale. This is, of course, a good thing. The hop combination is Tettnanger, Magnum and Citra, though it hides this at first, presenting burnt caramel and toffee in the aroma to begin with. This dark malt theme continues in the first sip, some almost coffeeish notes come into play, quickly followed by a dank green funk of the sort found in many an amber ale, and bringing to mind BrewDog's 5AM Saint in particular. Rather than bitterness, there's a sharp citric piquancy, followed by a long resinous, palate-coating finish. Those who prefer their IPAs to have a bit more fresh zing to them might rather think of this as an amber, but either way it's a good beer and a welcome addition.

On the above evidence, Molson Coors Ireland seems to be strongly outperforming its American and British brethern.

The Giro d'Italia came to Northern Ireland for a few days recently and I ventured up see the family and some shaven-legged men on bicycles. It was also an opportunity to try some of the newer beers to arrive on Ulster's burgeoning craft beer scene. As events transpired I didn't get to taste as many as I'd hoped, and I have the redoubtable Steve to thank for sorting me out with most of what follows.

But I'll start with one from a stalwart of Northern brewing, Hilden, and their commemorative Giro IPA Dunlop& Hume. We found this on cask in The Sunflower, a new star of Belfast's improving pub scene, and word from the brewery is it's the latest in a set of trial beers which will eventually culminate in a new permanent IPA recipe. This iteration is a pleasantly soft-textured pale gold beer which, while definitely hop forward, is not harsh or punchy. Peaches are to the fore, and the bitterness builds gradually turning towards spritzy lime by the finish. A rather jolly easy-drinker, all in all.

I expected more of an attitude from Co. Down's Farmageddon brewing collective, when Steve and I shared a bottle of their India Export Porter. This is 5.2% ABV and pours unctuously from the bottle, slowly forming a tan coloured head. It's not actually all that heavy, however. While the flavour suggests thickness -- all tarry and coffee sludge -- there's a roast barley or black malt element which adds a thinning dryness. It's no fault of the beer's, but the name puts me in mind of The Kernel's Export India Porter which has a marvellous fruit complexity that this lacks, so while it's a decently made beer and perfectly gluggable, I couldn't help but think that something was missing from it. Unfair of me, I know.

The second and final call on this dwarf pub crawl was The Hudson for a catch-up with Alex of Belfast Brewing. New to the line-up here was Yardsman, the first beer from East Belfast's Hercules Brewing Company. Nothing to scare the horses here: it's a golden lager, and rather a plain one. I had to work hard to find any distinguishing features among the fizz, which I suppose is considered a successful achievement in this style of beer. There's maybe a trace of some fruity esters in the aroma, and there's a little bit of grainy crispness on the palate, but that's pretty much all it has going for it. I guess I should count my blessings that it isn't a diacetyl bomb like so many first-time lagers.

Three northern bottles came back down the M1 with me, these ones from the western side of the province, where decent beer has always been even harder to find than it is in Belfast. I was particularly excited to get my hands on one from Poker Tree, a microbrewery based in my mother's home town of Carrickmore, Co. Tyrone. The brewery name -- from a tree under which the Devil plays cards on certain nights -- is a spot-on evocation of the local tales of the supernatural with which I grew up.

So Red Earl is one of a series of three so far, and is a red ale of 5.5% ABV -- a fair bit stronger than the norm for this style. I suspected something was amiss when I got the merest pfft of released pressure as I took the cap off. I courageously attempted to raise a head by pouring vigorously, and while that got me a few bubbles it also deposited a large amount of yeast into the glass. Unfortunately this is not a beer that bears yeast flavours well. It is nicely dark -- nothing wan or watery here -- and there's a surprising but pleasant coffee quality to the aroma. But it's difficult to tell what it's actually supposed to taste like. I get a wholesome cereal flavour, but without any crystal malt sweetness or hop bitterness or hop flavours. The yeast provides a savoury tang which rudely infuses the whole thing and the soupy effect is not at all helped by the near-total flatness. I really wanted to like this but I think there's serious work to be done. Bottle conditioning may not be the best way to go for this, for one thing.

I was much more careful when pouring Inishmacsaint Fermanagh Beer, though I nearly didn't have to: this bottle conditioned ale seemed quite willing to crawl out of the bottle all by itself. The resulting foam-topped glassful is a pleasant shade of pale amber and almost completely clear. The aroma is muted: mostly about the biscuity malts, and the flavour isn't exactly piled on either. Concentrating, I get a little bit of orange citrus and a lacing of cinnamon spicing on top of a rather plain baked graininess. It's highly inoffensive stuff and reminds me of some homemade English style bitters I've done which didn't turn out quite as planned. A bit of dry hopping would do this blank canvas the power of good.

Returning to more conventional styles, Inishmacsaint also brews Lough Erne Brown Porter. Another busy fizzer this, and slightly weaker than the previous beer, at 4.2% ABV. The label says it includes oats, which is always a bit of a gamble for me. This doesn't have the silky smoothness that oats are supposed to impart, but it doesn't have the nasty putty flavours which sometimes go along with it, thankfully. In fact, much like the Fermanagh Beer, it's a beer of very slight flavours, offering mild coffee and chocolate notes overlaid with a very dry burnt-toast crunch. No nasty off flavours jump out but my overall impression was of workmanlike homebrew rather than something commercial and artisan.

On this evidence the new wave of Northern Irish brewing still has a bit of work to do if it wants to make an impact beyond the local beer scene.

More west than south, really. All of today's beers are from Connacht microbreweries. The province's most prolific operation is, of course, Galway Bay. Their latest pilot batch was a Peanut Butter Stout, a hotly anticipated release, at least among those who didn't immediately go "ewww". It was a little bit of a let-down in the end. The name conjures rich, oily savoury peanut flavours but instead what we got was a fairly decent unexciting dry stout at 5.5% ABV. There is some lovely chocolate in the aroma, while the flavour blends dry crunchy roast, sweet caramel and just the faintest hint of savoury peanut. The latter is a little more apparent in the keg version, I thought, though there's not a huge difference between the two dispense methods.

Staying in Galway, and the paradoxically named Dublin Brewer Blonde, produced by Independent Brewing in Carraroe exclusively for The Larder on the capital's Parliament Street. I was bowled over by the Pale Ale from the same range so hopes were high for this. Unfortunately it doesn't come through. It's obviously intended to be inoffensive: beer for those diners who don't really like beer. But instead of crisp and dull, it's a bit bleachy, while the malt and hops provide elements of golden syrup, bubblegum, digestive biscuit and an acrid bitterness right at the end. I don't think I've ever criticised a beer for being too full-flavoured before, and that's not the problem here, but the elements don't sit well together and that swimming pool foretaste just spoils the party for me. Stick to the Pale Ale, folks.

And finally to Leitrim and the companion beer to the Pipers Pale Ale I reviewed a couple of weeks ago: Brazen Amber Ale. It's available on draught but I've yet to cross paths with it at a convenient time so this review is based on the bottled version which is 4.2% ABV. It pours a beautiful clear dark amber, though rather headless after the first fizz subsides and it smells grainy, something which follows through in the flavour. There's almost a porterish dark grain quality coupled with a Lucozade-like artificial fruit. The dry grain is firmly ascendant over the hops, putting it somewhere below the bar for amber ale, though in the happy place for Irish red. It's a perfectly decent drinkable beer, but if American amber ale is in your head when you pop the cap it's time to recalibrate.

Not the greatest of ambassadors for the Irish brewing scene, these, but the wonderful thing about beer is you never have to wait long for the next one.

Footnote from Munster: The new version of Hurricane IPA from Eight Degrees is an absolute belter. See, I knew it wouldn't be long.

Kirkstall Three Swords

A couple of English beauties from the beer engines of Dublin today. First up, Lord Marples: according to this book, one of the original beers from the ever-evolving Thornbridge brewery. This is their answer to your standard English brown bitter: a perfectly clear red-gold when it arrived from the handpump in Against the Grain, and a modest 4% ABV. The brewery hasn't abandoned the style spec altogether: there are no crazy hop acrobatics being pulled here. Instead there's just the right amount of dry tannic bitterness and a subtle layer of white grape and lychee fruitiness. This is very much a beer for drinking more than one of.

Staying in parts northern, The Porterhouse held its annual spring festival last month and while the emphasis was on Irish beers, Kirkstall's Three Swords somehow managed to inveigle its way in. I wasn't complaining, though. This is proper Yorkshire pale 'n' hoppy: a lurid washing-up-liquid yellow with a beautiful soft soda texture and a lemon drop flavour that's all childlike charm until the finish arrives with a very grown-up bitter bite. At 4.5% ABV it's that little bit stronger than Lord Marples but is every bit as moreish, albeit in a completely different way.

My goat is one of the easily-got breeds. The beer world and how it's described seems to have an inexhaustable supply of terms and trends to wind me up. Until recently, one of them was the style designation "Belgian Quadrupel", or worse: "Belgian Quad". While Westmalle brought us dubbel and tripel in the 1930s, quadrupel is a Dutch invention: there were no Belgian "Belgian quads". Until, as I say, recently.

De Halve Maan in Bruges were the first ones I noticed to spoil my indignation, with Straffe Hendrik Brugs Quadrupel. It's 11% ABV and the same dark brown-red as any quadrupel, with a thin layer of ivory foam on top. The aroma is an almost salty waft of dried figs and engine grease. Lots of sweetness on tasting: chocolate syrup, juicy prunes and a pleasant burn, like with fortified wine. And yet it's not overly hot or sticky: the flavours present themselves in a mannerly order and leave just when you're done with them.

A highly enjoyable dessert beer, this. Belgian Quadrupel: you are forgiven.

More prosaically, there's a tripel too: Straffe Hendrik Brugs Tripel. A style-compliant 9% ABV and a fairly normal orange-gold colour, with generous quantities of yeasty gobbets in suspension. I get weissbier-ish clove and orange peel from the aroma and bang-on spice, fizz 'n' booze from the flavour. The most amazing thing is that this has been sitting in my fridge for at least two years and still tastes daisy-fresh. Westmalle Tripel does not do that, I can assure you.

I visited Halve Maan back in 2006 and took away a memory of a visitors' centre that brewed two forgettable beers and outsourced their flagship to someone else. Looks like that may have changed.

Two from stateside which arrived courtesy of Richard (looking contemplative on the left of the photo). First up, Yellow Wolf, an imperial IPA from Alameda Brewing in that there Portland, Oregon. It's a stern 8.2% ABV but refreshingly pale. Yes, there's a certain toffee sweetness -- the Achilles heel of strong hoppy American beer -- both in the aroma and flavour, but not too much. Certainly not enough to spoil the deliciously piercing lemon rind flavour from the hops. Despite the strength and bitter intensity it remains nicely drinkable and I think we have the pale malt to thank for that.

Rockaway Brewing on Long Island don't normally bottle their beers but Richard managed to wangle an unlabelled one of High Plains Drifter out of them. Another 8.2%-er, this is a Bourbon-barrel-aged scotch ale. The bourboning isn't overdone and imparts a pleasant sourness from the whisky to counterbalance a fairly intense caramel sweetness. It would be spot-on except for a minor cardboardy whiff which may have something to do with the bespoke bottling process. Still a decent effort, if not hugely exciting given the effort that presumably went in to making it.

You don't often find foreign beers in Belgium. Maybe the odd off-kilter English or Italian speciality in the likes of Chez Moeder Lambic, but mostly the national supply keeps the pubs stocked. It would have been downright weird to find these two Bavarian lagers in a Brussels café. Instead, they came from the fridges at Brewers of Europe House, the rather grand embassy of European macrobrewing in the EU sector of Brussels.

Both are from Riegele, an Augsburg-based brewery whose beers I've generally found to be excellent, both their traditional styles and the more creative twists.

It felt a bit wrong to be drinking Riegele Kellerbier 700km from the keller. It is, as one might expect, a hazy lager, rich dark orange in colour. There's a certain weissbier-like fluffiness about the texture. Tastewise it's nothing to write home about: a kind of Ready-Brek sweet cereal flavour and accompanying warmth. It's smooth and sinkable, and just the thing when soaking up the atmosphere in an Augsburg bierkeller, though some of the effect is lost in the back garden of a Brussels townhouse.

Augsburger Herren Pils was much more to my taste, though doesn't do itself any favours by invoking the sublime Keesmann Herren Pils in its name. It's 4.7% and a perfectly clear pale yellow. The hopping is assertively done, all sharp and waxy but perfectly clean and nicely refreshing. As it happened I had access to the accomplished palate of Mr Carl Kins while I was drinking it and he reckoned there was some diacetyl in there. I couldn't spot it at all myself, but it would be remiss of me not to add that into the review.

But don't worry, Riegele, I still think you know what you're doing.

Invictus

One of those posts

No disclaimer large enough

An Italian job

Where all roads lead

Always something new

New beers from old friends

Nein!

What sap

One tough old bird

Hoppy sessions and foreign lessons

God no

That's grand

Mixing it up

North...

... and South

Pull the other one

Thanks, Hank

Coast to coast

Fancy meeting you here